Jackie Swift has been a better than average English teacher for all of her working life, running successful English Departments across the world, doing her best to foster a love of reading and writing in her teenage charges; sometimes even succeeding!

She's accumulated an excess of degrees over the years, including a PhD: in Creative Writing, no less.

She won her first prize for writing aged 10 and has been writing ever since: publishing articles, short stories and poetry; winning the odd small prize along the way, as well as publishing some dubious erotica under a very much assumed name.

She is inordinately fond of her three children, German Shepherds, wombats and polar bears. An Australian marooned in London with her £10 Pom husband, she is determined to return home some day to sit on her riverbank, surrounded by dogs and grand-children, drinking wine, growing vegetables and roses, writing (always writing), and putting the world to rights.